Daily Archives: June 27, 2018

QCon 2018 – Data, GDPR & Privacy

Posted on by
Reply

Title: Data, GDPR & Privacy – Doing it right without losing it all
Speaker: Amie Durr

See the table of contents for more blog posts from the conference.

Goals: send right message to right person at right time using right channel (ex: email, text, etc)

One company handles 25% of all non-spam email traffic

Confidence

  • We don’t trust brands with personal information. 2/3  overall. Nobody in room.
  • Employees at GDPR  compliant companies also don’t believe their company is

Recent thefts

  • Ticketfly – emails and hashed passwords.   Shut down their website
  • Panera – email, name, phone, city, last 4 digits of credit card number
  • MyHeritage – email and hashed passwords
  • Myfitnesspal – name, weight, etc

Need to consider

  • What do you store?
  • For how ong do you store it?

Data and privacy regulations

  • CASL
  • CAN-SPAM
  • Privacy Shield – for data leaving Europe
  • GDPR – EU
  • Future: Germany, Australlia, South America
  • Not about specific regulations. Need to care about data an privacy. Part of   Brand. Customers will leave

Supply for data scientists far exceeds supply

Build trust without stiffling innovation

  • accountability – what do with data, who responsible, continuing to focus on data perception,  audit/clean data, make easy to see what data  have and how opt out/delete
  • privacy by design – innovate without doing harm, don’t want to get hacked, be user centric, move data to invididual so no storing, what is actually PII vs what feels like PII. Anonymize both

Remember user data. If the user types it in, could be anything in here

What they did

  • dropped log storage to 30 days. Have 30 days to comply with requests to delete data. So  handled by design for log files
  • hash email recipients
  • Remove unused tracking data
  • Communicated with customers
  • Kept anonymized PII data, support inquiries, etc
  • some customers feel 30 days is too long so looking at going beyond law

Can delete parts of data vs everything (ex:: stack overflow)

brand and pr vs actually keeping user safe [like what happened with accessibility and section 508]

My take

Good talk. I liked the level of detail and concrete examples. I would have liked a refresher of GDPR. But there was enough to tell me what to google. That helped with what didn’t know (or forgot).

 

QCon 2018 – Privacy Ethics – A Big Data Problem

Posted on by
Reply

Title: Privacy Ethics – A Big Data Problem
Speaker: Raghu Gollamudi

See the table of contents for more blog posts from the conference.

GPDR (General Data Protection Regulation) – took effect May 25, 2018

Data is exploding

  • Cost of storing data so low that it is essentially free
  • 250 petabytes of data a month. What comes ater petabytes?
  • Getting more data when acquire other companies
  • IOT data is ending up in massive data lakes

Sensitive information – varies by domain

  • Usernames
  • user base – customers could be sensitive for a law firm
  • location – the issue with a fitness tracker identifing location of a military base
  • purchases – disclosing someone is pregnant before they tell people
  • employee data

changes over time – collecting more data after decision made to log

Privacy vs security

  • privacy – individual right, focus on how data used, depends on context
  • security – protect information, focus on confidentiality/accessibility, explicit controls
  • privacy is an under invested market. Security is more mature [but still an issue]

Solutions

  • culture
  • invest more – GDPR fines orders of magniude higher than privacy budget
  • include in perormance reviews
  • barrier to entry – must do at least what Facebook does if in that space
  • security – encrypt, Anonymization/pseudonyization, audit logs, store credentials in vault
  • reuse – use solutions available to you
  • design for data integrity, authorization, conservative approach to privacy settings
  • include privacy related tasks in sprint
  • design in data retention – how long do you need it for
  • automation – label data (tag/classify/confidence score)   So can automate compliance. Score helps reduce false positives

EU currently strictest privacy policy  Germany and Brazil working on. There was a debate on whether it applies to EU citizens or residents. Mostly agreement that physical location matters

My take

I was expectng this to be more technical. There was a little about the implications of big data like automation. But it felt glossed over. I would have liked to see an example of some technique that involves big data. The session was fine. It covered a lot of areas in passing which is a good opening session – lets you know where to plan. I think not having the “what you will learn” session on the abstract made it harder to know what to expect. Maybe QCon should make this mandatory?

QCon 2018 – Keynote – Developers as Malware Distribution Vehicle

Posted on by
Reply

Title: Developers as a Malware Distribution Vehicle
Speaker: Guy Podjarny @GuyPod

See the table of contents for more blog posts from the conference.

Developers have more power  than ever – can get more done and faster. Can also do more harm.

XCodeGhost – in 2015

  • XCode went from 3GB to 5GB
  • Too slow to download in China
  • Developers use a local mirror
  • Have to trust unofficial download
  • XCodeGhost is  XCode + a malicious component that compiles in to the OS. It targets the linker.
  • Went undetected for 4 months
  • Contamiated hunreds of Chinese apps and dozens of US apps
  • US got it fro Chinese built apps and via a lirary
  • Got up to 1.4M active victims a day
  • Apple fixed in AppStore imediately, but took months for users. Including enterprises
  • The real “fix” was to take down the websites were contacting
  • Apple fixed root problem by hosting official XCode download in China
  • Because targeted linker, developers were the distirbution vehicle.

Delphi virus – Induc – 2009

  • Targets Delphi
  • Every program copiled on machine is affected
  • Even if uninstall and reinstall Dephi, it stays
  • Took   10 minutes to find
  • No app store, so harder to remove
  • Affected millions

First instance of this concept  – 1984

  • ”Reflections  on Trusting Trust” – Ken Thompson
  • Modify C compiler to “miscompile”
  • Three trojans – allow a hard coded password, replicate the logic in C Compiler and use a disassembler to hide and deletes from source code
  • Wrote a proof of concept. Think didn’t escape Bell labs
  • Can’t find. Not in source code and can’t disassemble
  • Best soluion is to compile on two computers/compilers and compare the output. Not practical.

Malicious dependencies

  • npm bad  dependency
  • pipy  bad dependenc this year
  • Docker bad image this month

Must trust the people who write the software.

We ship code faster.   Hard to find if deveoper introduces code maliciously or accidentally.

Developers have access to user data Be careful

Syrian Army and Financial Times

  • phishing email
  • link redirects to finanicial times spoofed page
  • now have emails so send emails that look  like from finanical times
  • IT attempted to warn users.
  • Attacker send identical email with evil links
  • Gain access to official twitter
  • Syrian Army use to make statements
  • A developer noted that think wise to this and still fall for it. We all fall for this.
  • Salesforce did an internal phishing test and developers were the second higest clickers

Uber – 2016

  • Attackers  got driver and user data
  • Uber paid 100K ransom. Agreed later that shouldn’t
  • Public found out a year later
  • Developers had stored  S3 token in  private github repo
  • Not using 2FA
  • Deveopers can access extremely sensitive data and  share it too often

As we get more power, we need to get more responsible

Causes of  insecure decisions:

  • Different motivations  – focus    On functonality. Security is a constraint. Need to be cognizant of it
  • Cognitive limitations – we move fast and break things
  • Lack of expertise – don’t always understand security implications
  • Developers are overconfidence. Harder to train where think know it.
  • ”It doesn’t happen to me” .  Security breaches happen to everyone.

Mitigations

  • Learn from past incidents
  • Automate security controls
  • Make it easy to be secure
  • Developer education
  • Manage access like the tech giants
  • Challenge access requests.  When need. For how long. What happens  if don’t have access. What can go wrong with access? How would you find out about access being compromised?

Google BeyondCorp

  • All access route through corporate proxy
  • Proxy grants access per device – limits what can do from Starbucks
  • Monitoring access

Microsoft Privileged Access Workstations (PAW)

  • Access to production can only be from a secure machine
  • No internet from the secure machine
  • Your machine is VM  on secure machine

My take

Great start to the day. I had known about some of these, but not others. For some reason, this reminds me of developer ghost storires.